**updated** After many years of attending UKgovcamp, I’ve finally made it to my first *local* govcamp which was faithfully hosted by Bristol City Council. A friend of the City Council for many years (specifically, https://www.connectingbristol.org/) I could hardly refuse – especially when my luck came …

It always amazes me when companies spend top dollar on top shelf software. Nine times out of ten, despite all the bells and whistles, it just isn’t usable. No better example than Emptoris from IBM which is used by UKSBS to manage tenders for government. …

So, thanks to Black Friday I am now the proud owner of the Amazon Echo Dot. If I had my way it should be on every shopping list this Christmas – although I haven’t tried the new Google equivalent yet. For those of you …

The Democratic Society (in conjunction with Snook) recently published a report for GDS to look retrospectively at the digital aspects of government consultation and make recommendations for a future model. It was disappointing that The Consultation Institute had not been involved at greater depths. …

I’ve been lucky enough to have seen a lot of continental Europe. There will always be things I love and hate about foreign lands but I’ve decided to put up my “top 10’s”. I suspect this is a very British perspective. It is a …

The single departmental plans are now out, so it was a good opportunity to see what digital activities are on the cards. Tackling digital inclusion seems to be ingrained as a theme across the departments, otherwise the focus is largely on improving transactional services. As …

I was inspired when I recently read how a Google employee had secured the Google.com domain for his own company after it accidentally lapsed..and how Google had paid him $6006.13 (aka “Google”) in reward. Even more inspired when they doubled this after he decided …

Government is now looking at its digital strategy for the next five years which will set the agenda for the UK and Parliament in that period. It has revealed four headline themes:- Unlocking digital growth; Transforming government; Transforming day to day life; Building the …

Sometimes you come across something which is so bad that you just have to expose it. As the Government Digital Service has done such a great job improving the quality of online transactions over the last couple of years, I was horrified to come across …

It was refreshing to see the range of online consultation attempts by DoH in this video. As much as I like the folks at Delib, online survey as an input method is just too limited and (let’s be honest) a bit old fashioned. It’s …